Imagine a great, circular labyrinth suspended in space. There are four entrance points, one at for each of the cardinal directions: north, east, south, west; from these entrance points, our goal is to find the center. This is Koten Benson’s The Mandala of the Buddha Mothers Refuge of all Beings.
I first came across The Mandala of the Buddha Mothers Refuge of all Beings in the form of a small printed booklet, transcribed from a series of talks Benson gave at Shasta Abbey in California in May 2004, at Lion’s Gate Buddhist Priory, a small monastery nestled deep in the Botanie Valley near Lytton, British Columbia. Since then, I’ve been studying it, copying and recopying it by hand into notebooks: at home; at a bus station in Kamloops; after the kids have gone to bed while babysitting at my sister’s house; watching playoff basketball at my parents’ place, pen moving across paper leaving curves and lines of ink while the Jazz and Clippers or Spurs and Grizzlies trace patterns across the court, screening and cutting and curling and passing, accompanied by the squeak of sneakers on wood and the practiced flow of the announcers‘ voices. The booklet is short but deep, simple yet thorough. It begins with an introduction and a series of offertories, and then transitions into the main part of the book, about forty pages divided into six sections, before ending with three diagrams and a chart.
Koten Benson is from Newfoundland, a culturally distinct part of eastern Canada. He studied in America under Jiyu Kennett, an English woman who combined her background in Western church tradition with the Buddhism she learned in Japan. She trained with the Soto Zen sect, which considers its founder a man named Dogen, who himself brought his style of Buddhism from China. The Chinese Buddhists trace their lineage to Bodhidharma, a monk who introduced Buddhism to China from his native India, where Buddhism got its start under Siddartha Gautama, Shakyamuni Buddha.
From India to China to Japan to England to America to Canada. It’s been a journey, and as a result, The Mandala of the Buddha Mothers Refuge of all Beings has a sense of placefulness that is both blurry and precise--grounded in thousands of years of tradition and yet distinct from those traditional boxes, seamlessly a part of the Buddhist mosaic while also not quite fitting in.
It takes time to see things in a context. It’s easier to pretend they stand alone. It feels safer. This is what this book means. This is what this movie or piece of music is worth. This is who this person is. This is the event that happened and why, and here is the beginning, middle, and end of it.
Context comes slower, and only to those who look for it. It makes things less certain but more clear. And context has depth as well as breadth: we are shaped by the past and the present. We‘re pulled outwards by our present circumstances, and pushed along by the rivers of the past, the momentum of the generations that preceded us. Nothing and no one stands alone.
Yet we experience consequences alone, and we alone experience our lives. Context may shape the people and things around us, but we can still find meaning in those things and experience those people even when that context changes. Things might not mean what they did, or even what the person behind them intended them to mean, but that doesn’t make them less meaningful. It all stands on its own…and so do we.
By the time this sentence ends, our context will have changed. Your inhale has become an exhale, or vice versa. Your eyes have moved. You’re hearing a new sound, or an old one has vanished or changed. You are experiencing a feeling or a thought. Maybe it’s about what you are reading or about something else going on in your life. You might be aware of it, or you might not have noticed it until you read these words. But it is there, and it is changing. And if you were to go back and reread that first sentence, years, months, or even only seconds later, you will find that context has changed again. It’s the same words, but it has become a new sentence--or at least, a new experience.
Understanding this matters.
Or rather, it matters if you want to understand. This changing continues to happen whether we understand or not, so understanding doesn’t really matter. But it’s helpful if we do.
Helpful isn’t a word we often use much to describe truth. But we feel it when it‘s there. Helpful has a sincerity, a quiet strength. It puts a gentle hand on our shoulder and without calling attention to itself, points to something we can see clearly for ourselves now that we know where to look. Such is The Mandala of the Buddha Mothers.
Let’s come round again to our great circle in space. It’s immense, but if you reach out, you’ll find it small enough to explore with your two hands. Do this. Feel it under your palms and fingertips. Get to know it, and then draw it in and hold it against your chest. The mandala is large, large almost beyond comprehension, but it can be contained within the vessel of your own heart.
Find it there.
* * *
Sometimes it is easier to find something in ourselves after we’ve first seen it in someone else. For me, that someone was Rod. Such people are not necessarily hard to find, but they are not necessarily easy to recognize. The qualities they’ve grown don’t advertise themselves; we have to look for them. This is a solitary journey, and yet we can’t do it alone. Rather, we can’t do it completely alone.
We need more than teachers. We also need the community of those that walk beside us, and we need those that walk--not against us, nobody walks against us--but at cross-purposes to us. The ocean of others lifts us up and batters us from side to side and in the end, we swim alone and together.
The times we most want to be by myself are often the times we most need others. The things I try most desperately to get from other people, are the things I can only provide myself.
Rod is much more a people person than I am. We are different in many other ways as well. We aren’t looking for someone who is like us, or different. It’s not about having things in common. It’s not about sharing a personality or worldviews. It’s not about being like each other, and it isn’t always even about liking each other.
Nor is it about a meeting of the minds. This connection is not about words, nor is it about roles. Yesterday, I felt it daubing at an accidental paint spill on a fifteen year old special need student’s shirt. She stretched her shirt down to make it easier for me; I daubed gently with a paper towel. That was all there was, and there was connection.
We expect connection from our families and loved ones, and it’s there, but often they and we are too busy living our lives to notice it. We also receive helpful messages that do not help: find the right people, the right relationships. Working on and perfecting relationships takes priority over experiencing the joy in having them.
We have intimacy with strangers as well. Both performers and audiences at comedy shows, at pro wrestling events, at burlesque performances experience this. This spring, the hockey team in my home city made the playoffs for the first time in over a decade. Friends and strangers were dressed in the same colors, in the arenas and in the bars, on the streets and in schools and dentist offices and grocery stores. During one game, the microphone failed before the national anthem. The crowd in attendance sang it together. This is intimacy. This is joy. Intimacy is simple. Connection is not complicated.
Recovering Couples Anonymous, a twelve-step program for partners, says this:
“Each of us is responsible for the presence or absence of intimacy between us. As soon as each of us accepts responsibility, we are ready for Step One of RCA. Step One involves taking full responsibility for the health or disease of the relationship. Each person carries 100%”
We can contemplate this advice will all our relationships in mind, not just our committed romantic ones.
No one can tell you what to do. Some people try anyway. Sometimes we want them to. We don’t always want to decide for ourselves. But we are deciding, even when we think we aren’t, even when we think we’re just doing what we are told or what we have to or what is expected of us.
The mandala tells us the truth. It doesn’t tell us what to do, but it will describe what happens. This is not a prescription. We do not have to do anything we don’t want to do. We don’t have to take anyone’s advice. We can do whatever we want, and the consequences will find us. We don’t have to worry about them or try to force them to happen or not happen. They will happen anyway. Relax and choose your choice without worrying or anticipating what will come. What will come will come whether or not out we worry or anticipate. But if you are worrying or anticipating, don’t worry too much about that. What will come will still come.
Around again we walk. We’re seeing the same mandala, but differently, because even though we’re only walking in circles around it, each circle brings us closer, and as we get closer we notice new things.
“Splash some water on your face,” Mr. White tells Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs, a plain, quietly-spoken sentence in a movie woven from flashier, louder ones.
I know water best from pipes. I engage my wrist; there is a moment of resistance; and then the tap turns and water emerges in a sparkling stream. I like to drink straight from the faucet, feel the water on the side of my mouth.
But water lives in other places. I see it in the mornings, fat drops on leaf blades. It swells the river a few blocks south of where I live. It gathers in clouds. It fills the oceans, though I’ve only experienced the ocean from the city shores and airplane windows. It came in through an iced up pipe in my old condo building. I couldn’t sleep from the sounds of it dripping through cracks between my window and walls. I find beads of water in bathtubs and sinks, dampening the mud in the field by my parents house. I exhale it; my partner and I fogged up the entire inside of her Mazda one summer night.
Water is everywhere, and how often do we notice it?
We’re another turn closer to the mandala now, but as we circle again, before we enter, we need to contemplate water. What is it? What does it do? Where do we find it in our lives? It’s such a common substance we barely notice it, but I’m asking that we notice it now, as completely and thoroughly as possible. What does it look like? How does it feel? What is the sound and smell and taste of water?
What do we know about water? Not what we know from books or science teachers, but from what we’ve experienced, our personal relationship with it. What is our understanding of water?
No comments:
Post a Comment